MIRSOFT: mediator for integrating and reconciling sources using ontological functional dependencies

Abstract

Providing automatic integration solutions is the key to the success of applications managing massive amounts of data. Two main problems stand out in the major studies: (i) the management of the source heterogeneity; (ii) the reconciliation of query results. To tackle the first problem, formal ontologies are used to explicit the semantic of data. The reconciliation problem consists in deciding whether different identifiers refer to the same instance. Two main trends emerge in the reconciliation process: (i) the assumption that different source entities representing the same concept have the same key – a strong hypothesis that violates the autonomy of sources; (ii) The use of statistical methods that identify affinities between concepts – not suitable for sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a methodology integrating sources referencing shared domain ontology enriched with functional dependencies (FD). The presence of FD gives more autonomy to sources when choosing their primary keys and allows deriving a reconciliation key for a given query. The methodology is then validated using LUBM.